I love my country because of its uniqueness in a lot of aspects. However, it hurts me a lot that every time we have the elections, it’s a war of rhetoric and sentiments. It’s unbearable especially in the news and online discourse.
when hayao miyazaki said that true love was two people inspiring each other to live...recognizing just how hard living is, putting one foot in front of the other every day, how easy it is to lose our passion for it...... that's the real shit
Birds can literally see the Earth’s magnetic field thanks to specialized light-sensitive proteins in their eyes.
Migratory birds possess one of nature’s most remarkable superpowers: the ability to navigate thousands of miles with incredible precision. At the center of this ability is a protein called Cry4 (cryptochrome 4), found in the retinas of their eyes.
When blue light enters the bird’s eye, it triggers a quantum reaction in the Cry4 proteins known as the radical pair mechanism. This ultra-sensitive process responds to the orientation and strength of the Earth’s magnetic field, essentially turning the bird’s visual system into a biological compass.
Scientists believe birds don’t just sense magnetism — they may actually see it. The quantum fluctuations likely appear as subtle visual patterns, shadows, or color gradients overlaid on their normal vision, much like an augmented reality heads-up display.
This extraordinary adaptation allows migratory birds to cross oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges with pinpoint accuracy, relying on the strange rules of quantum mechanics to guide them on their epic journeys.
AI is not for everything but today it helped me to figure out a Chinese drama that I used to watch when I was a kid. I have been trying to remember it for like two decades now.
I was probably 10 and the series is Shaolin King of Martial Arts.
In 1837, the Shah of Persia gave Queen Victoria a small herd of Kashmir goats as a coronation gift.
She kept them at Windsor for a while, then, for reasons lost to history, sent some of them to live on the Great Orme, a limestone headland sticking out of the North Wales coast like a thumb pointing at Ireland.
That was 189 years ago.
The goats are still there.
Nobody fed them. Nobody bred them. Nobody asked them to stay. They simply did, because the Great Orme is windswept, salt-blasted, vertical in places, and entirely covered in the kind of scrub that goats consider an invitation rather than an obstacle.
There are now around two hundred of them. Pure white, slightly mad-looking, technically still the property of the Crown, which has shown no particular interest in collecting.
During the 2020 lockdown, when the streets of Llandudno emptied, the goats came down off the headland and took the town. They wandered the high street. They ate the hedges of the Premier Inn. They blocked traffic on Mostyn Street and looked at drivers with the calm assurance of animals whose ancestors used to graze with the legions of Cyrus the Great.
A photograph of one of them standing outside a closed pharmacy went around the world.
The goats did not pose for it.
The goats were checking whether the pharmacy had hedges.
It did not.
The goats moved on.
The Royal Welsh Fusiliers' regimental mascot is still drawn from this herd. The Crown Prince of Britain is, technically, the goats' landlord. The goats have not been informed.
The goats are on the Great Orme.
They will outlast the Premier Inn.
They will outlast most of us.
They are not asking for anything.
They never were.
Friendster has returned more than a decade after shutting down, relaunching in April as an iOS app.
The revamped platform allows users to connect only with real-life friends by physically tapping phones together, after which they can share posts within their network.
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Cook pine trees from New Caledonia display a consistent and unusual growth pattern: they lean toward the equator no matter where they are planted, southward in the Northern Hemisphere and northward in the Southern Hemisphere.
Studies examining 256 trees across five continents confirm this predictable, hemisphere-dependent tilt. The degree of leaning also increases with latitude, meaning trees planted farther from the equator tend to show a more pronounced angle, typically averaging between 8.05° and 8.55°.
📸 Johns et al., Ecology (2017)